Anthony Trollope tops Hatchards poll to find best novel of past 200 years | Books | The Guardian Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope tops Hatchards poll to find best novel of past 200 years London’s oldest bookshop chooses first instalment of Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles, The Warden, as best novel published since the shop’s opening in 1797 ‘It’s a fitting tribute in the author’s 200-year anniversary’ … Anthony Trollope in around 1875. Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images Friday 27 November 2015 02.00 EST Last modified on Friday 27 November 2015 02.02 EST Close This article is 1 year old The customers of London’s oldest bookshop Hatchards have eschewed the erotic appeal of EL James and the thrill-a-minute conspiracies of Dan Brown to choose Anthony Trollope’s gentle satire of the Church of England, The Warden , as their favourite novel of the past 200 years.

An initial list of about 100 titles was drawn up by Hatchards in what a spokesperson described as “an unsurprisingly lengthy meeting or two”. This longlist, drawn from books published in the 218 years since the shop opened on Piccadilly, London, was then whittled down to a shortlist of six. To celebrate Anthony Trollope’s 200th anniversary, writers choose their favourite novel Read more Ranging from Muriel Spark’s tale of an eccentric school teacher The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, first published in 1961, to Christopher Isherwood’s take on 1930s German society, Goodbye to Berlin, the shortlist was arrived at by combining a public vote and a tally of copies sold in the shop. Also in the running were PD James’ Adam Dalgliesh mystery Original Sin, the first novel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence, A Question of Upbringing, and Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March, a look at the Austro-Hungarian empire through three generations of one family.

But, after Hatchards displayed the lineup in its store to keep votes coming, it was the oldest novel on the shortlist, Trollope’s 1855 title The Warden, which emerged triumphant on Thursday evening, with the bookseller – now part of the Waterstones group – again using a mix of public votes and sales to determine the winner. Hundreds of customers voted, according to Hatchards, and The Warden was the “standout” favourite. The first of Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series, introducing readers to the world of Septimus Harding and Archdeacon Grantly, The Warden covers the scandal that ensues when an almshouse for the elderly, run by the church, is accused of being financially mismanaged. The accuser, John Bold, is a surgeon, and also the suitor of almshouse warden Septimus Harding’s daughter, Eleanor.

The poet Michael Symmons Roberts, marking the 200th anniversary of Trollope’s birth in the Guardian this spring , selected The Warden as his favourite novel by the author, saying that “the brilliance of Trollope’s storytelling lies in his ability to twist and turn your allegiances as a reader, page by page”. Trollope himself wrote of The Warden in his autobiography that “the characters of the bishop, of the archdeacon, of the archdeacon’s wife, and especially of the warden, are all well and clearly drawn. I had realised to myself a series of portraits, and had been able so to put them on the canvas that my readers should see that which I meant them to see.” Hatchards’ Gavin Pilgrim described The Warden as “a thoroughly deserving winner”, which “beautifully symbolises, along with Hatchards itself, the unwavering love for great British books”. “When we set out to find our customers’ favourite novel of the last 200 years we had no idea what they might select,” he added.

“The initial list covered the full 218 years that this shop has been open and was full of excellent books.” Hatchards events manager Simon Lewis added that the process had been “a lot of fun, a challenge as well – but we all remained friends at the end of it”. “I would say that The Warden is a Hatchards sort of book in two ways. First, it will have been selling in Hatchards since it was published in 1855, but more importantly it is simply a brilliant book. The only thing a Hatchards sort of book will ever be is engaging, thought-provoking and enjoyable,” said Lewis. Hatchards has commissioned a limited print run of The Warden from Penguin Classics, with the hardback featuring a new Hatchards introductory page and William Morris endpapers, as well as a new cover design. The bookseller, which was established in 1797 by John Hatchard, called the new edition “a particularly fitting tribute to Trollope in the 200th year since his birth”.

ClionaReeves.com - Library - Book Reviews - The Warden, by Anthony Trollope The title may seem minimialist, even uninspiring by modern standards, but this is one of those do-not-miss books, principally because of the title character. The Warden is the Rev. Septimus Harding, one of the gentlest characters in literature. As Warden of Hiram's Hospital in Barchester, he cares for the spiritual well-being of the twelve retired wool-carders, who live at the hospital in modest comfort. All is peaceful and contented until John Bold, a zealous reformer of perceived corruption in the Church of England, begins a campaign to investigate whether Mr. Harding is entitled to his salary of £800 a year. Enlisting the aid of both Mr. Finney (a local attorney) and Bold's friend Tom Towers, a journalist with The Jupiter, he presses the question on two fronts, in Barchester and in London. What he has not accounted for, is that Mr. Harding, one of the kindest and best-loved people in Barchester, might be open-minded enough to see merit in his argument. Nor has Bold accounted for the reaction of Mr.

Harding's younger daughter, Eleanor, whom he has been courting. This book (short for a Trollope novel) begins the sequence of the six Barchester novels, all set in the cathedral town and recounting the stories of the inhabitants. The bellicose and explosive Archdeacon Grantly (married to Mr. Harding's elder daughter, Susan) is one of the most entertaining characters in literature. His introduction here, and his ready, eager and energetic defence of Mr. Harding (with the aid of the Attorney General, Sir Abraham Haphazard) sets the stage for titanic battles between the apoplectic Archdeacon and the later arrivals in the second book (Barchester Towers): the changeable Dr. Proudie, the immovable Mrs. Proudie, and the scheming Mr. Slope. Available at: Your Public Library (Fiction: TRO) Your University Library (PR5684 W3) Your Local Bookseller The Warden : Anthony Trollope : 9781909621077 Anthony Trollope Classics About Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope was born in London in 1815 and had a troubled childhood.

His father was a barrister of good family determined to educate his three sons as gentlemen but unable to afford it. Anthony, the youngest, suffered most. Large and ungainly as well as embarrassingly impecunious, he suffered cruel mistreatment at Harrow and Winchester. His mother Fanny came to the rescue by winning fame and wealth as an author. She found Anthony a job in the Post Office in 1834. After seven hard years he transferred to Ireland, where he prospered, married, and started to write novels of Irish life. Posted back to London he travelled widely devising mail-delivery routes and was inspired to write his first novel set in England, The Warden, in 1855. It was followed by Barchester Towers, launching the popular series of Barsetshire Chronicles that established his literary reputation. Dozens more novels including the political series The Pallisers and many works of history and journalism were to follow. In 1867 he resigned from the Post Office, where he is credited with introducing the pillar box, to write full-time. He did so until his death in 1882.

show more Follow us The Warden by Anthony Trollope | PenguinRandomHouse.com Add to Cart About The Warden The first of Trollope’s popular Barsetshire novels, set in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester, The Warden centers on the honorable cleric Septimus Harding, one of Trollope’s most memorable characters. When Harding is accused of mismanaging church funds, his predicament lays bare the complexities of the Victorian world and of nineteenth-century provincial life. And, as Louis Auchincloss observes in his Introduction, “The theme of The Warden presents the kind of social problem that always fascinated Trollope: the inevitable clash of ancient privilege with modern social awareness.” About The Warden When John Bold decides to challenge corruption in the Church of England he sets the whole town of Barchester by the ears with consequences both comic and sad. Trollope’s first masterpiece is the study of conflicting loyalties and principles in a cathedral city where the gentle warden becomes an unwilling focus of national controversy. The resulting story is both a fine comedy of manners and a magnificent group portrait. THE WARDEN is the first novel of the Barsetshire series.

About The Warden The first of Trollope’s popular Barsetshire novels, set in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester, The Warden centers on the honorable cleric Septimus Harding, one of Trollope’s most memorable characters. When Harding is accused of mismanaging church funds, his predicament lays bare the complexities of the Victorian world and of nineteenth-century provincial life. And, as Louis Auchincloss observes in his Introduction, “The theme of The Warden presents the kind of social problem that always fascinated Trollope: the inevitable clash of ancient privilege with modern social awareness.” Get the news you want from Penguin Random House Praise “Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy . . . of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself.” —Henry James About Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) was born in London to a bankrupt barrister father and a mother who, as a well-known writer, supported the family.

Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim both as a novelist and as a senior civil servant in the Post… More about Anthony Trollope About Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) was born in London to a bankrupt barrister father and a mother who, as a well-known writer, supported the family. Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim both as a novelist and as a senior civil servant in the Post… More about Anthony Trollope About Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) was born in London to a bankrupt barrister father and a mother who, as a well-known writer, supported the family. Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim both as a novelist and as a senior civil servant in the Post… More about Anthony Trollope Product Details The Warden - Anthony Trollope - Google Books Anthony Trollope 49 Reviews With an essay by Robin Gilmour. 'It was so hard that the pleasant waters of his little stream should be disturbed and muddied ... that his quiet paths should be made a battlefield: that the unobtrusive corner of the world which been allotted to him ...

made miserable and unsound' Trollope's witty, satirical story of a quiet cathedral town shaken by scandal - as the traditional values of Septimus Harding are attacked by zealous reformers and ruthless newspapers - is a drama of conscience that pits individual integrity against worldly ambition. In The Warden Anthony Trollope brought the fictional county of Barsetshire to life, peopled by a cast of brilliantly realised characters that have made him among the supreme chroniclers of the minutiae of Victorian England. The first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War. What people are saying - Write a review User ratings LibraryThing Review User Review - JBD1 - LibraryThing I've not read Trollope before, and just recently decided it was time to fill that particular gap in my education, so resolved to begin picking up nice copies of his works as I found them. Quite ...

Read full review LibraryThing Review User Review - RidgewayGirl - LibraryThing I had been warned that this is not Anthony Trollope's most exciting novel, but as it is the first in the Barsetshire Chronicles and I had a copy at hand, it was the first Trollope that I've read. It ...

Read full review Selected pages Hirams Bedesmen 5 Dr Grantly Visits the Hospital 6 The Wardens Tea Party The Jupiter Tom Towers Dr Anticant and Mr Sentiment A Long Day in London Sir AbrahamHaphazard 18 The Warden isVery Obstinate 19 The Warden Resigns Farewell View all » Common terms and phrases Abraham Haphazard allthe almshouse andhe andthe andthen ANTHONY TROLLOPE archdeacon attorney�general ayear Barchester Barchester Towers bedesmen bishop Bold’s brother Bunce buthe bythe cathedral Chadwick Chapter Chronicles of Barsetshire church clergyman clerical comfort Cox and Cummins Crabtree daughter dear didnot doubt Dr Grantly drawing�room Eleanor Harding eyes father father�in�law feeling Finney fromthe gentleman hadbeen hand Handy Harding’s heart hecould hehad hehas Henry de Blois hewas hisown hospital hundred income inhis inthe John Bold John Hiram’s Jupiter knew lady lawyer London looked Mary matter Miss Harding morning Mount Olympus MrHarding never newspaper ofhis ofMr ofthe onthe papa petition Plumstead Episcopi poor precentor quiet reformer saidhe shewas Sir Abraham

 Skulpit son�in�law sorrow St Cross sucha talk tell thathe thearchdeacon thewarden things thought tobe tohis Tom Towers tosee tothe Towers Trollope Trollope’s walked warden wardenship wasa whichhe About the author (2012) Anthony Trollope (1815-82) was one of the most widely enjoyed and prolific novelists of the nineteenth century.

His books include the great Chronicles of Barsetshire, of which Barchester Towers is the second volume. Trollope worked for the Post Office for much of his adult life, combining postal and literary business as he travelled around the British Empire. He has been credited with the creation of the distinctive British pillar box. To celebrate Anthony Trollope’s 200th anniversary, writers choose their favourite novel | Books | The Guardian Anthony Trollope To celebrate Anthony Trollope’s 200th anniversary, writers choose their favourite novel Poor man’s Dickens, or master of motives and manners? Authors pick the book that they most admire, from the Bishop of London on The Prime Minister to Antonia Fraser on Can You Forgive Her? Susan Hampshire in the BBC dramatisaion of The Barchester Chronicles, 1982. Photograph: BBC Saturday 11 April 2015 03.01 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 06.09 EDT The Prime Minister (1876) In the interviews preliminary to my selection for training as a priest I was asked if there was a particular clergyman who had inspired me.

“Dr Grantly of Plumstead Episcopi,” I replied and indeed my first love of Trollope came from wandering in his company through the lanes of Barsetshire. But the novel I am enjoying in this period of pre-election frenzy is The Prime Minister. The prime minister of the title is a Liberal who sits in the House of Lords. In another contrast to our own time the level of service which could be expected of the Post Office in 1875 is astonishing. There is mention of a letter written by the Etonian crook Ferdinand Lopez, posted in central London at 3am and received in the rural depths of Herefordshire in the evening of the same day. The political theme in the novel is interwoven with the story of Emily Wharton and the blackguard Lopez, who is even subjected to the ignominy of being blackballed from Trollope’s favourite club, the Garrick. Emily, who has led a rather sheltered existence, finally hears the financial facts of life from a victim of Ferdinand Lopez’s disastrous sub-prime guano speculation.

Her informant from Ponders End explains: “They goes and buys things they haven’t got the money to pay for and then waits to see if they’ll turn up trumps. Isn’t that gambling?” The book contains some of Trollope’s most extensive excursions into the realm of political ideas. Lord Brock, a thinly disguised picture of Lord Palmerston, may have preferred “men to measures” but the Duke of Omnium expounds the creed of a conservative Liberal, which Trollope claimed as his own. He wanted to advance towards greater equality without ever quite getting there in a way that might discommode his present style of life. The Duke also had an enthusiasm which is represented in the novel as a somewhat cranky obsession – the introduction of decimal coinage. Trollope’s world, like ours, is full of anxiety. His Barchester is continually invaded by London and by the power of the media exemplified by the pitiless Quintus Slide, the master of character assassination by innuendo. Trollope, by contrast, encourages us to believe that all people are to be treated gently.

Andrew Davies He Knew He Was Right (1869) While we were rehearsing my BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now , I got talking to one of the actors, Oliver Ford Davies , a tremendously knowledgable Trollope enthusiast. I asked him if he knew of any other Trollope novels with a comparable edge and intensity, and he suggested I look at He Knew He Was Right, a book I’d never heard of. I did, and I was immediately hooked. Its central theme is the corrosive power of jealousy and it is a deliberate take on Shakespeare’s Othello. Louis Trevelyan has everything he could wish for: plenty of money, a respected place in society, and a beautiful wife, Emily, who is as much in love with him as he is with her, with whom he has a much-loved infant son. What could go wrong? Everything. Louis becomes obsessed with Emily’s friendship with a certain Colonel Osborne, an older man with a reputation. The friendship happens to be innocent, but it unmans Louis, who orders Emily to break it off. Understandably offended – after all, what has she done wrong? – Emily refuses.

(If the principal subject is jealousy, the secondary theme is the power play within a Victorian marriage.) Things go from bad to worse. Louis snatches the little boy and takes him to Italy, where he is utterly wretched. His obsession gradually destroys his health and his sanity. It’s all pretty gut-wrenching, and so far from Trollope’s usual genial worldliness that one wonders what life experience inspired it. Antonia Fraser Can You Forgive Her? (1865) During the dark days of the war, I noticed that all the grownups were reading green leather volumes with gold lettering on the cover. I asked my mother what it was all about and I thought she replied: “It’s the trollop: he cheers us all up.” As it happens, I did know the word “trollop”, possibly through my favourite Harrison Ainsworth. Therefore I could quite see why a merry wench with oranges in her apron and other gifts to bestow, might cheer everyone up. (At the same time I took note that men could be trollops too). Naturally, my next step was to read one of these jolly works, helping myself from the green row in my parents’ bookcase.

At which point I fell in love. The book I had picked out at random was Can You Forgive Her?: instantly Lady Glencora Palliser became my heroine. She was not exactly a role model, being uneducated, impulsive, tousle-haired, addicted to the love rat Burgo Fitzgerald and, in later volumes, a marvellously anarchic wife to the prime minister. After all, who could resist Burgo? I quote: “He was one of those young men with dark hair and blue eyes, who wear no beard and are certainly among the handsomest of God’s creatures”. I feel moved when I contemplate the scene when the broken Burgo, living abroad because he has gambled everything away, has to be rescued from his debts by Glencora’s austere but chivalrous husband, Plantaganet Palliser, future Duke of Omnium: on condition the wastrel remains in a small German town where there is no public gaming-table. There are six Palliser novels: the so-called “politicals” (as opposed to the Barsetshire series, although characters do overlap). I read the whole lot every two or three years and now understand the welcome conviviality they bring.

Roy Hattersley Phineas Finn (1869) Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels teach us very little about the real stuff of politics. Programmes and policies are what make the political world go round and in five long volumes – six if The Eustace Diamonds counts as part of the series – Plantagenet Palliser rises from backbencher to prime minister without showing much interest in either. Trollope knew that he “could not make a tale pleasing, chiefly or perhaps in any part” by politics. But he built his stories of “love and intrigue, social incidents and a dash of sport” against a background of, usually confounded, parliamentary ambition. Sitting in the press gallery – still smarting from his defeat in the bruising Beverley byelection – he became an expert on political conduct, motives and manners. In consequence he became the master of the brilliant glimpse. None of the Palliser series has more love and intrigue than Phineas Finn, The Irish Member. Finn, elected to parliament thanks to the support of a peer with a rotten borough at his disposal, spends more time falling in love than in the House of Commons.

The objects of his affection are all members of society and usually both rich and “already spoken for”. In one case his intrusion into an already established relationship results in him fighting a duel. The circumstances of his resignation from the government – disagreement over Irish tenant rights – is not only one of Trollope’s rare excursion into “issues”. It is an even rarer example of Trollope admitting that honour is not unknown on the green benches. The need for romance is satisfied by Finn choosing to marry for love rather than the fortune of a banker’s widow who wanted to finance the resurrection of his political career. But Phineas Finn is also packed with glorious little revelations that expose tricks of the parliamentary trade which are still in common use. “In spite of his assumed fury, the gentleman was not irate. He intended to communicate the look of anger to the parliamentary reports of his speech and he knew from experience that he could succeed in that.” And the journalists who are happy to be deceived? They are represented by Quintus Slide whose motto is “If it is true I have every right to publish. If it is not I’ve every right to ask the question.” O tempora. O mores.

Philip Hensher Orley Farm (1862) Orley Farm was the novel of Trollope’s that most of his contemporaries admired, and it’s a book of immense, cumulative power. Like everyone else, I love the Trollope of easy charm and amusement in absurdity, but the books of his I find most compelling are the analyses of processes. The wheels of Orley Farm grind slowly, and the complexity of its story is designed to daunt the reader. The lawsuit on which the story turns, as Orwell said, must be the most detailed in fiction, and it draws the reader in slowly, with its quality of objective clarity. A woman may have forged a signature, years before, for the best of reasons; she has made an enemy in a way that ought to be harmless; his revenge is enabled, and completely out of proportion. What is the law here? What would the weak and fallible people like the result to be? The novel is full of exquisite little sketches of humanity, like the commercial travellers insisting on their rights in an inn against an intruding lawyer. There is the best, and most amusing account of a miser’s meal when the lawyer first visits the hopeful heir.

The novel doesn’t strive for warmth or charm, for once, but its world is shaped by a lucid and interested account of good and bad behaviour. The fascination of the book is in the rigid purity of principles, against which human beings tremble, quail and shudder. Trollope thought Orley Farm was flawed because it reveals the truth of the matter too early. I think it adds to the terror of the novel that, after a certain point, there is no escape from the facts, only a frightening possibility that above the demands of justice stands a still crueller set of demands, called duty. Orley Farm is, in the end, an unusually adult fiction. Alan Johnson Barchester Towers (1857) It was, I think, Trollope’s long career as a post office surveyor that first attracted me to his books. I was enthralled as much by his methodology as his literary reputation; rising at the same unearthly hour as I did to deliver the Queen’s mail, he’d begin writing at 5am. By the time he left home to begin “surveying” (whatever that was) he’d completed his daily quota of 3,000 words.

Telling the truth about this system undoubtedly damaged his reputation among those who believed artistic genius involved no process other than waiting for inspiration to saunter along in its own good time. Trollope’s literary genius is, in my view, unquestionable and never more apparent than in Barchester Towers. Henry James said that Trollope had “ a complete appreciation of the usual”. So much of what he writes about seems muted and undramatic. Yet the reader is gripped as tightly by the apparently humdrum goings on in Barchester as by any murder mystery. His characters are, at least, comparable with Dickens (his great contemporary) with less eccentricity. Is there a better villain in Victorian literature than the Reverend Mr Slope, with his hair “always formed into three straight lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precession and cemented with much grease”? Or a more noble hero than the quiet and unassuming Mr Harding? Through Eleanor Bold, Trollope provides a deep insight into the position of women in Victorian society. Above all, politics pervades this story as much as in any of the Palliser novels. Its clergymen are tossed around in the clash of ideas. Low church battles high church.

The Oxford Movement is on the attack; the German Higher Criticism attracts and repels in equal measure. There is no mention of Darwin and it was only after I’d read this magnificent book that I realised why. It had been published two years before The Origin of Species . Barchester’s clergy had yet to face their most formidable challenge. Kwasi Kwarteng Phineas Finn (1868) Trollope has always been a controversial writer. Not in the sense of being a provocative or particularly radical novelist, but people have always argued as to how good he is. One of Trollope’s problems was that he told everyone his working methods. He got up very early every morning and wrote from 5am to 8am. He then went to his day job in the Post Office. He wrote with amazing facility, churning out 47 novels in 35 years. Of all his political novels, I would argue that Phineas Finn is the most engaging. It tells the story of a young man, the only son of a successful Irish doctor, who ends up in London studying law. A lacklustre student, the young Phineas is charming and handsome.

He makes many prominent friends, including a politician, Barrington Erle, who suggests he stands for parliament. Finn gets duly elected and starts a parliamentary career with a maiden speech that is a bit of a fiasco. After various scrapes and attempts to woo appropriate young heiresses, Finn returns to his Irish roots and becomes a fervent supporter of a new bill enshrining tenant’s rights. The governing party, of which Finn is a member, does not support the bill. Finn resigns on principle and retires from politics. This novel shows all the craziness of mid-Victorian politics and the superficial way in which politics was connected to grand society. Trollope exposes all the ambitions and social neuroses of a world obsessed with status, influence and power. Being mid-Victorians, social status was everything to the characters in the book, which is peppered with absurd, aristocratic figures who have little to recommend themselves but high birth and fortune. There is no sense in which merit or application have anything to do with the governance of Britain. The charm of the narrative derives from the fluency with which Trollope tells a story, and the sheer improbability of many of the plot lines.

Victorian readers would have loved the glamour and charm of a social and political world to which they had absolutely no access. Today, we can learn about that world from Trollope’s engaging novels, of which Phineas Finn is probably the most representative, as far as the political novels, are concerned. Ferdinand Mount Cousin Henry (1879) How quick Trollope is to grasp a place. He can land anywhere in the British Isles and make a novel out of it. There’s no milieu he cannot get the hang of: the cathedral close, the Mayfair mansion, the Irish cabin. In Cousin Henry, he captures the rural society of South Wales (one of the many areas he roamed in his days at the Post Office). It’s a story about a missing will and two not very attractive characters: Henry Jones, a miserable London clerk who inherits the estate of Llanfeare in Carmarthenshire under the will of his uncle Indefer Jones, and Isabel Brodrick, a proud and prickly girl who is her uncle’s favourite but whom he has disinherited because he thinks the estate ought to go to a male heir, until having second thoughts on his deathbed.

After coming to Llanfeare, Cousin Henry finds the new will but lacks either the ruthlessness to destroy it or the honesty to reveal it. He just sits in his uncle’s dismal little book-room, frozen with terror, trying to avert his gaze when in company from returning to the fateful volume. Cousin Henry is a wonderful book about being frightened. Trollope evokes Welsh small-town life with brilliant economy: the suspicious servants at Llanfeare, the gossip of the attorneys and drovers in the Bush Inn at Carmarthen, Mr Owen the curate who Indefer says won’t do for his niece because his grandfather kept the Lion at Pembroke (both pubs still exist). Pinterest Trollope writes with ‘a gripping terseness’ in Cousin Henry. Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images Trollope is written off by his critics as a prosy, ambling sort of writer churning out his 3,000 words a day. But in Cousin Henry he writes with a gripping terseness – I noticed one page that contained scarcely a word of more than one syllable. Trollope’s special excellence is in conveying mixed, unstable characters such as most of us are.

By comparison, the great fictional monsters like Casaubon and Widmerpool seem one-dimensional. Far from occupying a comfortable middlebrow shelf, the best of Trollope’s novels secrete a rare moral poetry. To say that beneath a bluff exterior he has the finest of feminine sensibilities is an old-fashioned way of saying that he writes intensely human novels of the sort that today are mostly written by women. Andrew O’Hagan The Way We Live Now (1875) Trollope brings the operations of English society on to the page like nobody else. His characters are less colourful than Dickens’s and less fine than Henry James’s, but they come from life, and The Way We Live Now is as fresh as this morning’s newspaper. Augustus Melmotte, the chief financier in the novel, has as much insolent, bonus-seeking arrogance as a Fred Goodwin and a Bernie Madoff combined. The vulgarity of his ambition, however, is no match for the ugliness of the social prejudice surrounding him. People fall over themselves to befriend him, then to shun him, and the novel reveals the mechanisms of social class and how they are greased with money and oiled with pretension.

Set between Marylebone and Pall Mall – with outings to Islington and Suffolk – the book is essentially a London novel about the decay of honesty. Of all his works, this, to my mind, is the greatest outing for Trollope’s art, where the relationship between capital investment and old family money is the major theme. He shows how love and marriage can be mere parasitical sub-relationships to this one, and how even the smallest successes can be got by swindles. Trollope wrote it quickly, yet we see human nature at work in a maze of plausibility. James spoke of the author’s “complete appreciation of the usual”, and that is the dominant force in this moral book. We see the young Sir Felix Carbury falling drunk through the streets of the West End, fresh from a bath of sleaze. We see newspaper editors and parliamentarians shaping reality to suit their opportunism. The “We” of the title is not everybody: it is the people who find other people simply usable, and Trollope’s satire is extensive.

“Lady Monogram cared nothing for Melmotte’s villainy, as regarded herself … She had but a confused idea of any difference between commerce and fraud.” But no good novel is an editorial. The Way We Live Now is a masterpiece of modulated prose, where every image and every line adds to a tapestry of moral degeneration. The private clubs and the drawing rooms of the period were well-inhabited and studied by the author, and he transformed the particular energies of his day into something universal. The book is a huge comment on present iniquities and a beautiful revelation of the kinds of greed that may hide in entitlement. Anthony Quinn The Prime Minister (1876) The Prime Minister is to my mind the most enjoyable of Trollope’s six Palliser novels (1864-80). Its fusing of the personal and the political is masterly, and its dramatic texture feels finer-grained than any other in the sequence. It is set – plus ca change – in the years of a coalition government, though it is impossible to imagine its leader, the Duke of Omnium, aka Plantagenet Palliser, permitting a “photographer” to enter his kitchen.

It seems highly unlikely that the Duke himself ever set foot in there. These are troubling times for Planty Pall, whose principled reserve revolts against the sneaky compromises and dishonesties that coalition politics entail. It further dismays him that his sociable wife Glencora should throw open Gatherum Castle to entertain on an extravagant scale and set the gossip-mill turning when she makes a favourite of Ferdinand Lopez, a shady political chancer who has just married into wealth. Glencora’s tipping Lopez the wink about standing for the borough of Silverbridge, long in the Palliser pocket, sets a fuse that will run down to calamity. Around this double-headed plot Trollope creates a living fresco of mid-Victorian society from high to low. His characters by now seem like old friends, especially those who had crossed swords in earlier books, such as the Irish politician Phineas Finn and the scurrilous journalist Quintus Slide of the People’s Banner. Quintus Slide: has any newspaperman in fiction ever been better named?

Trollope was a genius at naming, and in fact I did him the dubious honour of pinching one from this book – a minor political bully, Du Boung – for a novel of my own. Let me confess: I owe my love of these novels and of Trollope to television. As a 10-year-old in 1974 I was mesmerised by the serialization of The Pallisers in 26 weekly episodes (adapted by Simon Raven) and still have the Radio Times magazine special with its cover front of Susan Hampshire as Lady Glen. When I read the novels themselves years later I still pictured its characters as I recalled them from the screen – so Stuart Wilson would forever be Ferdinand Lopez, Phillip Latham the PM, Donald Pickering the raffish Dolly Longstaffe, and wonderful Barbara Murray, who died only last year, Madame Max. I am more grateful than I can say to the BBC and producer Martin Lisemore for sparking not merely an interest in Trollope but the earliest stirrings of a reading habit.

Michael Symmons Roberts The Warden (1855) I had the wrong idea about Trollope for years, based on a cursory scan of his work in my 20s. I had him marked as a low-wattage Dickens, lacking edge and passion. When I was asked by Radio 4 last year if I’d be interested in dramatising some of the Barchester novels, I took it as a cue to test my prejudice by giving him some proper attention. The Warden is where Barchester begins, so it’s where I began too. The warden himself is Septimus Harding, a gentle elderly clergyman who devotes his life to the care of 12 retired working men at Hiram’s hospital, an alms house established by the wealthy John Hiram centuries before, funded by his legacy. It’s an arrangement that works for Mr Harding and his charges, but when a young reforming doctor questions the financial arrangements, the orderly life of Cathedral Close begins to unravel. Dr John Bold believes that the Warden’s annual stipend is too high, and that the patients of Hiram’s Hospital are underpaid. With reforming zeal he sets out to correct this injustice.

The brilliance of Trollope’s storytelling lies in his ability to twist and turn your allegiances as a reader, page by page. There are no villains from central casting here (unlike some of Dickens’s) and the fact that Dr Bold is engaged to marry Rev Harding’s daughter Eleanor means the stakes are high for all concerned. It is a brilliantly spun story, and its central themes are as urgent as ever. The effects of money – its absence or presence – on people’s lives is at the heart of the current election campaign, but not many contemporary novelists write this well about it. Trollope had seen his family slide from wealth to poverty, and that experience informs his work. When Dr Bold takes his campaign against Mr Harding to the popular press, Trollope offers a compelling and prescient account of the burgeoning power of popular opinion mobilised against an individual. It’s a 19th-century version of the self-righteous attacks described in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Essentially, it’s a book about public and private morality, about the possibility and definition of human goodness. I can’t think of a better time to read it.

Joanna Trollope Miss Mackenzie (1865) This is certainly one of Trollope’s least assuming novels, concerning, as it does, an unremarkable spinster who, having lived a life of Victorian female usefulness to others, suddenly appears to have come into real money – enough to embark on a life of independence at last. The money also makes her, for the first time in her quiet life, an object of considerable attraction, to three suitors as well as a classic 19th‑century evangelical group, whom Trollope treats with the kind of ingenious mockery more usually associated with Jane Austen. But there is far more to the novel than just the narrative, and what it reveals about the Victorian gender hierarchy. Trollope confesses, in his autobiography, that he was trying to write a novel in which the final pairing off had nothing to do with love, and that this proved impossible. In fact, his authorial feelings are conflicted as he is plainly on his heroine’s side, yet fails to provide her with any male character whom either he, or we, as readers, can feel is even halfway good enough for her.

Margaret Mackenzie develops in both strength and grace as the book progresses, but her eventual choice of husband remains a distinct disappointment, and a lacklustre choice, even if she declares herself well satisfied by it. What is so fascinating about the subtext of the novel is that Trollope clearly wanted to break convention, both as a novelist and a man, but the prevailing opinions of his day proved too strong for him, just as they did for his heroine. But that doesn’t prevent this novel from suggesting and portraying all manner of intriguing things, particularly from a female perspective 150 years later, and containing some wonderfully sharp characterisation, particularly of rampant insincerity. It also has two of the best set pieces in all Trollope – a terrible dinner party given by Mrs Tom Mackenzie and a truly dreadful charity bazaar in aid of the orphans of black soldiers who had died in what Trollope calls “the American war”. If he were a less genial writer as a whole, one might describe both set pieces as merciless... AN Wilson The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) Trollope fails many tests for me – I do not find him rereadable, as all my truly favourite novelists are.

He is sentimental and slapdash; when you read a name like Parson Quiverful, you yell, “Try harder, Trollope!” Sentimental without (unlike Dickens) the ability to make me cry. And yet, and yet. Like the creators of really good soap opera, he can start a fairly trivial trail and make you absolutely obsessed with discovering the outcome: Lady Mason’s very understandable decision to forge the codicil in her husband’s will, to benefit her son ( Orley Farm ), or Mark Robarts’s stupid willingness to guarantee the bills of the spendthrift Mr Sowerby ( Framley Parsonage ) that lands him page-turningly close to bankruptcy. My wife and I once sat up all night reading aloud The Eustace Diamonds – we could not sleep until we knew whether Lizzie Greystock got the necklace. The most agonising of these dramas, for me, is contained in The Last Chronicle of Barset. Mr Soames, Lord Lufton’s agent, drops a cheque. Poverty-stricken and absent-minded, though honest, Parson Crawley picks it up and uses the proceeds to pay his bills. Never mind The Archers .

Victorian England ground to a halt in 1866-67, wondering how this almighty fix would resolve itself. Sermons were preached about it. I probably exaggerate when I say there were questions in the House of Commons, but the story obsessed everyone, and, of course, Crawley is that wonderful mixture of stiff-necked and admirable which leaves you in doubt, until the very end, about what really happened. In the end, it comes to involve nearly all our old friends in Barsetshire. The scene in which Mr Crawley answers back Mrs Proudie is one of the best in all Trollope: “‘Peace woman,’ Mr Crawley said, addressing her at last. The bishop jumped out of his chair at hearing the wife of his bosom called a woman” ... This almost prepares us – but nothing could prepare us – for that woman’s really moving end. Did I say Trollope could not make me cry? I had forgotten the scene when the former Warden, whose dilemma over Hiram’s Hospital began the series of Barsetshire tales – opens a drawer and looks at his long-neglected violin.

Jesse Norman The Way We Live Now (1875) You might expect a politician, and especially one in the midst of a general election, to choose one of Trollope’s great political novels: Phineas Finn , perhaps, or Can You Forgive Her? . Like them, my choice is a cracking read. But it has even greater contemporary relevance. The Way We Live Now tells the tale of the rise and fall of Augustus Melmotte, against the backdrop of the rampant city speculation of the 1870s. Melmotte is a super-financier, who appears from nowhere and quickly sets about seducing the British establishment. In so doing he triggers a myriad of interlocking subplots. The penniless Lady Carbury is desperate for her feckless boy Sir Felix to marry Melmotte’s daughter. An American, Hamilton Fisker, wants him to finance a new railway line from Salt Lake City to Veracruz in Mexico. Melmotte, now an MP, spies in this scheme an unmissable opportunity to separate gullible investors from their cash. Only Fisker’s nephew Paul Montague seems to stand in his way.

But both Sir Felix and Paul have their secrets … So why do I love it? Well, who wouldn’t love such a fast-moving and bitingly satirical plot, let alone one that also examines the nature and causes of financial dishonesty? But, lest this seem too pious, the book is lifted above the merely moralistic by three things. The first is the artistry with which Trollope unfolds the action, moving from ambiguity and shadow to devastating clarity as Melmotte’s grand swindle finally unravels. The second lies in the personal, social and financial detail that Trollope carefully accumulates in order to depict that gilded age, and Melmotte’s final crash, in such an utterly persuasive way. And the third is the brilliantly drawn character of Melmotte himself, a monstrous figure who strides through the narrative with tremendous brio, to its final and inevitable climax. And behind all this is an unnerving reflection: that once dishonesty leaves the everyday behind, once it becomes magnificent and all-embracing, it can somehow cease to be what it is. Those around it lose their sense of proportion; they can be dazzled, or bought off. Human nature is at once fragile and unchanging.

And that’s not an irrelevant thought, as we look back at the financial scandals of the past few decades. The Warden by Anthony Trollope · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Classic Literature Fiction The first novel in Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, The Warden is a compassionate portrait of the gentle, thoughtful warden and precentor of Barchester Cathedral, Mr Septimus Harding. Loved and appreciated by all with whom he works, Harding lives an ordered, regular life in his protected religious environment. Then one day, a young reformer feels he has uncovered a mismanagement of funds and Harding is held to blame. The accusation comes as a shock not only to Harding himself but also to the cathedral community. It then comes to wider notice when the cause is taken up by a national newspaper. Trollope's insight into character, his abundant imagination, and his sheer narrative skill are at their peak in The Warden. Setting and Character: Septimus Harding Introduced Setting and Character: Septimus Harding Introduced George P.

Landow , Professor of English and the History of Art , Brown University [ Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> Anthony Trollope —> Works —> Social History —> Characterization ] These opening lines from The Warden begin with a mention of Trollope's protagonist but immediately turn to the place in which the narrative is set — the fictional cathedral town of Barchester. The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of ------; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected. Let us presume that Barchester is a quiet town in the West of England, more remarkable for the beauty of its cathedral and the antiquity of its monuments, the west end of Barchester is the cathedral close, and that the aristocracy of Barchester are the bishop, dean, and canons, with their respective wives and daughters.

Why does Trollope choose to invent a fictional town rather than one of those he names — Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester — and why does he emphasize that the clergy form the "aristocracy of Barchester"? As one might suspect from such an opening, Trollope's placement of The Warden within a cathedral town leads to a story involving Church of England clergy. How do the narrative events of this novel, particularly its conflicts, differ from other Victorian novels in which Anglican clergy appear — for example, Gaskell's North and South and Brontë's Jane Eyre? How does Trollope's treatment here differ from that in his later, non-Barchester novels and from that of Dickens 's dissenting ministers? The Warden Audiobook | Anthony Trollope | Audible.com "Simon Vance reading the Chronicles: Perfection" Would you listen to The Warden again? Why? I love the Chronicles of Barsetshire, and Simon Vance is the perfect reader for them. I have listened to The Warden (a very good book), Barchester Towers (one of the best books of all time), and I am currently about half way through Dr. Thorne.

In The Warden, it was great listening again to Trollope's description of the press - and the politicians - as his insights are all still relevant today. It is, perhaps, a pity that they sound so fresh, but at the same time - it makes one ponder the fact that we are more often led by reporters, rather than educated by them. What a great book! Who was your favorite character and why? The Warden Harding is a man of incredible ethics, and in today's world of ethical rationalizations, he sounds weak. Have you listened to any of Simon Vance’s other performances before? How does this one compare? No one is better to take you on a visit back to through Trollope's classics than Simon Vance. This reading is everything I would expect from Simon - in fact, I decided to re-visit this series when I discovered that Simon Vance was reading it. "The Series Begins . . ." The first of the Barchester series, The Warden seems obviously designed to set up the next five novels. It's fine on its own, but not the best of Trollope by any means. Mr.

Harding, warden of an almshouse for 12 elderly disabled men, finds himself the target of a lawsuit promoted by his daughter's admirer. The claim is that the benefactor's will did not mean for the church to use the bequest to fund a warden, but that it was meant to go directly to the 12 men. Complicating the situation is the fact that the archdeacon, married to Harding's elder daughter, insists on fighting the suit, which gets nasty in the public press. The plot focuses on how Mr. Harding, a genuinely kind and good man, deals with the stress and his own conscience, and how his daughter Eleanor struggles between her fierce love for her father and her growing affection for John Bull, the lawyer behind the lawsuit. "Terrible reading of a great book!" How could the performance have been better? I love Trollope and am usually not at all picky about the performances of recorded books, but I found this reading of The Warden unbearable! Simon Vance adopts a strange, high-pitched, affected tone of voice every time he reads the women's lines that makes Trollope's female characters come across as gross caricatures.

The gentle but always intelligent Eleanor Harding sounded like a half-witted flirt, Mrs. Grantly sounded like a snooty society matron instead of a sensible clergyman's wife, and the love scenes were absolutely painful! Mr. Vance is a very good reader generally, and if only he could have rendered the female characters in a more natural tone of voice this would have been a fine and worthy reading. I switched to the Timothy West reading for the remainder of the Basetshire Chronicles, and am so glad I did. I really don't think I could have stood a simpering Mary Thorne!! "May prove challenging to contemporary readers" A clergyman, Mr. Harding, is accused of abusing of his privilege of receiving a high income for very little work, and that church funds are being misappropriated; both accusations made by a young reformer who also happens to be in love with the clergyman's daughter, and influences those who are directly under the clergyman's protection and benefiting from his generosity. Mr. Harding is well-loved by all, and the combination of the savage media outcry that follows and his unimpeachable honesty pushes him to take actions which are against his best interests.

Can't say I absolutely loved this novel, but I read it in the context of a tutored read on LibraryThing and the two tutors had a wealth of knowledge to share about the clergy and moral attitudes of the time and so on, which certainly helped this modern reader appreciate the story a lot more than I would have without my mentors. That being said, I look forward to listening to the next book in the series, Barchester Towers. "The Difficulty of Finding & Doing the Right Thing" Poor meek, mild, and middle-aged Mr. Septimus Harding! The warden of small Hiram???s Hospital (almshouse) in Anthony Trollope???s first Barchester novel, The Warden (1855), Mr. Harding sees to the food and lodging of twelve poor old men and gives them their daily allowance of one shilling and fourpence (to which he has added out of his own money twopence per day). As a stipend for his post, he receives 800 pounds per year from Hiram???s fund.

He has enjoyed seeing to the physical and spiritual needs of the old men, playing melancholy and lovely violoncello music, and living comfortably with his younger daughter Eleanor in the fine house and beautiful garden that go with the wardenship. His placid life is rudely disrupted when a young doctor named John Bold, a well-meaning, self-righteous, and reckless reformer, champions the cause of the twelve old men, whom he sees as being cheated out of their just amount of money by Hiram???s Hospital and the corrupt Church of England. Anthony Trollope tells an absorbing story featuring a small cast of very human characters and themes extending beyond the central legal case to the overly influential role of the mass media in modern society, the ambiguous motives and results of reform-minded people, the human tendency to never be satisfied with what one has, the difficulty of doing the right thing when dealing with people and money, and the nature of friendship. And yet I wonder whether Trollope need go into such lengthy detail in his satire of the pamphlets of Dr. Pessimist Anticant (AKA Thomas Carlyle) or his critical description of the children of Mr. Harding???s son-in-law.

And although I like Trollope???s conviction that no one is all evil or all good, I wonder if his critique of reformers (including Mr. Popular Sentiment, AKA Charles Dickens) is completely fair or warranted, trenchant though it is. Simon Vance gives his usual smooth and professional reading, but his young female characters (as they often do in his other books) sound artificially high-pitched and nasal. His Eleanor is almost insufferable when she (Vance) says, ???Oh, paPA!??? But I did care very much about Mr. Septimus Harding and his plight! And I enjoyed and or was moved by most of The Warden. I recommend it to anyone who likes the work of Dickens and who wants to read one of his contemporaries who has a different approach to human nature, social problems, and fiction.

Question: Septimus Harding is the title character in which Anthony Trollope novel?
Answer: The Warden